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Strike, it's the only power they have. Until they get shot for being on strike that is, or run over by a tank.. this is happening in China you know..

No, I don't know, throwing a few links would be helpful. China has few human rights when compared to developed nations, but I doubt they'd shoot random people over nothing. "Encouraging" people to not cause trouble is much more efficient in the long term (e.g. you strike you become unemployable; I'm not saying they do this, but it would work better than shooting people). And sometimes the best you can do is do nothing at all, if you push people too hard too often they might strike back.

And actually, China lets them strike because it hurts the US more than China. It's not like Apple is going to close the slave labor camps any time soon, even if they lose a few bucks.

Foxconn workers striking is troublesome for Foxconn, and on a lesser degree for Apple and China. But Apple is an important customer, so I'd bet the one hurt the most, by far, is Foxconn, they might even have to give some discounts to Apple if the strike continues for too long.

I just hope the strikers manage to get something, it's about time the Chinese people can have a share of China's amazing growth.

The Tiananmen protests were against the government, the "Communist" rule (which today is mostly just a word rather than a philosophy), and lack of free speech.It was also, as you mention, 23 years ago.

These protests are against working conditions at a private employer. The Chinese government are also a lot more interested in foreign investment these days, and the wanton murder of unarmed workers is not a good way to let the world know they should move their business there.

You do know that Apple recently opened up manufacturing in Brazil, right?

Apple only opened the Brazil plants because Brazil wouldn't let them sell iPhones in Brazil unless they did. Don't act like they did it out of the good of their hearts. If that law didn't exist they'd shut down the Brazilian plant faster than you can say "Saint Steve Jobs" and move it back to China.

While I agree with your point, I have seen anyone that tries to implement common sense laws to protect the US economy labelled and belittled by people that make more profit sending things overseas for cheap labor. If you speak common sense about an economy, you are silenced by propaganda. It's not about the people of the US any longer, it's about the top getting more at all costs (and no, I'm not referring to the upper 10%, more like the upper.1%.

I wrote an article about 20 years ago which was ignored, stating that the shipping of industrial jobs overseas would kill our economy. Hell, I was not alone by a long shot. Numerous economists, philanthropists, etc.. etc.. were already warning of it way before I was. The Ford model worked, and made us prosper. Middle class people spend their money, the upper 1% does not. This is how we get and hold our positions in the economy.

Look at Detroit and Flint. Tons of cash was there for both the upper and middle classes. Every middle class household owned 2 cars, and a mortgage. Increases in pay meant that the middle class purchased snow mobiles, boats, motorcycles, wave runners, hunting gear, fishing gear, "Big Screen TV", etc.. The middle class money tends to be very liquid.

The upper class in Detroit owned houses they rarely stayed in. They go on trips, they don't spend locally. They invest to get more money and property, they don't purchase locally and definitely nothing trivial like a snow mobile or wave runner. If they purchased a boat, it was an investment boat and again not generating money locally. That makes sense, it's how the wealthy remain wealthy and increase wealth.

The lower class in Detroit were all in line to become middle class. They stood outside the auto plants applying all the time, took shop classes, got GEDs and went to school all in hopes of getting to the middle class.

So when we sent all the middle class jobs overseas, the economy collapsed. At first, the wealthy still had money. But in short order, even they lost out. Property values dropped massively sticking everyone that owned property with huge debt and no capital. The lines stopped forming at the plants, and people started dropping like flies out of school. Now once prosperous areas in Detroit are like ghost towns.

All of these things were called out in the 80s, before NAFTA was passed and the plants were moved first to Mexico then to China. Not by me, but by countless economists gave warnings and said "DON'T DO NAFTA!". Those guys were told that they were just being protectionist, if they were heard at all.

No, too simple, and everyone did it, it would be the end of world trade.

But, there is a point in saying "you want our citizens money, then contribute something to our economy". So giving corporations a choice between various options would be a good way that solves both issues. Two immediately apparent ways are to either create jobs or pay an import tax. I'm sure there are others.

Now an import tax sounds crazy at first because, after all, it will be the local buyers and not the corporation that pays it. But

I know, it's a euphemism for the people who actually run the businesses, anybody who creates a product or a service that people end up buying because they like the product. This word is an acknowledgement of the fact that people do not understand why running a business as opposed to being an employee often provides somebody with a better life style.

So you are saying that a business owner by definition never does wrong or acts immorally? I mean, you are saying that calling a business owner a robber is always

turns out the ipod's promise to revolutionize the way we live, only applies to its consumers.

And water is wet. I wonder why it is so mystifying that a "promise", vaguely defined as it is, made to a group of consumers, happens to apply only to that group of consumers? The previous post completely fails to understand what a promise is (even if we ignore whether such a promise actually were made). If I promise to help a friend clean their attic, I didn't just issue a blanket promise to help everyone clean their attics. It matters who the promise is made to.

I don't see how a country with such a large workforce can have any traction in a strike? Foxconn is a huge employer over there. Their working conditions are what most westerners would describe as "sweatshops", but then so are 95% of the rest of the manufacturing plants over there, so despite being unusual for "us", it's not at all uncommon for "them".

I wonder how long it takes for Foxconn to find another 4,000 workers willing to do the job for the pay? I simply can't believe that any of those employees weren't fully aware of what was and could be asked of them. They just want more pay for what's probably more work, and certainly longer work weeks. But if there are three people lined up behind you waiting to do that job for that pay the moment you turn your back, a strike doesn't seem like a good idea.

Strikes and unions just don't make sense for unskilled labor. And just because it's electronics doesn't make it skilled - if you're doing something that could be replaced with a robotic arm, it's not "skilled", skilled refers to mental skills, not physical.

I wish I had more insight into this "chinese holiday" thing though. I get the impression they take it a lot more seriously than we're giving them credit for. I see a lot of the chinese stores going on holiday all at once, it's obviously a widespread thing, maybe that five day vacation is their unwind time for the rest of the year in the sweatshop? In that case I think I can start to understand where it becomes a big deal. Kinda stupid of Apple to expect them to launch a new production line at that time, they had to see that one coming. I would expect them to have had a conversation with foxconn, "can you DO this?" And foxconn either adding a premium to the cost during that time, or sniveling and saying they'll make it happen, to keep their biggest customer. Oh to be a fly on the wall...

There aren't that many workers lining up in China any more. Well there is in the interior, but that is not where the factories are (yet). Mass migration from the interior to the coast is no longer very practical.

When you have moved a thousand km away from home and get to see your family a few times a year, you really don't want to lose a day of holiday. You're already likely to spend a day travelling at each end of the holiday.

Anyway, the days of doing low-wage manufacturing in China are almost over. Luckily.

Strikes and unions just don't make sense for unskilled labor. And just because it's electronics doesn't make it skilled - if you're doing something that could be replaced with a robotic arm, it's not "skilled", skilled refers to mental skills, not physical.

Actually, unions make far more sense for unskilled laborers. As an engineer, I don't need a union to bargain for my wages. My bargaining power lies in the fact that my skills are in short supply. Companies must pay me competitive market wages because it would take them years to train someone to replace me. Contrast that with an unskilled laborer. They have no bargaining power by themselves because, by definition, they can easily be replaced by anybody else the company hires. Only by joining with all the other unskilled workers do they gain any sort of bargaining power. A single unskilled worker threatening to quit has no real effect on a factory, but the entire group of laborers can effectively shut down the factory in the short-term.

Unions can be pretty fucked up in practice, but in theory they represent the only way unskilled laborers can gain any sort of bargaining power.

A single unskilled worker threatening to quit has no real effect on a factory, but the entire group of laborers can effectively shut down the factory in the short-term.

And because they are unskilled in an economy where people are looking for work you can let them all go and head out to the job market to replace them.

You have to remember lock-outs are just as viable as strikes in industrial dispute. A short term loss is easily absorbed if you manage to suppress the rising cost of your workforce. It's amazing how quickly people back down when they don't bring a paycheck home at the end of the day.

Where I work this was done. The workforce threatened to strike every day and r

And because they are unskilled in an economy where people are looking for work you can let them all go and head out to the job market to replace them.

New people still need to be shown how to do the job, even for unskilled roles. And will take a few days to get up to speed. Not a problem when you're replacing one at a time. But if they all go at once, there's no experienced ones to train the new ones. And where you're taking a workforce of thousands, even if management know how to do all the jobs, it's going to take them a long time to get a new workforce trained and up to speed.

It's amazing how quickly people back down when they don't bring a paycheck home at the end of the day.

New people still need to be shown how to do the job, even for unskilled roles. And will take a few days to get up to speed. Not a problem when you're replacing one at a time. But if they all go at once, there's no experienced ones to train the new ones. And where you're taking a workforce of thousands, even if management know how to do all the jobs, it's going to take them a long time to get a new workforce trained and up to speed.

The company managed to start so they have a lot of foundation in place. The hardest thing about starting a company is not training the employees it's building the contracts with suppliers and customers. Assuming you can sort your mess out before they jump ship any productivity issues that last a few weeks will end up being a rounding error on the bottom line. End result, very short term pain, minor loss in wages, a MAJOR message to the workforce.

I'm not trying to fight any pro or anti-union argument. I was just responding to a couple of inaccuracies in your anti-union argument.

You said "It's amazing how quickly people back down when they don't bring a paycheck home at the end of the day." and thats wrong. Some strikes are long, protracted affairs. There are no general private industry lessons to be learned from the outcome of the UK miner's strike, because it was a nationalised industry, with a government that wanted to crush all unions. A whole di

Strikes and unions just don't make sense for unskilled labor. And just because it's electronics doesn't make it skilled - if you're doing something that could be replaced with a robotic arm, it's not "skilled", skilled refers to mental skills, not physical.

The factory cities are mostly staffed by people who by and large ARE the educated work force of China. Most of the miniature assembly work is semi technical and does require training. Also you are very sadly mistaken about how important the labour movement was to the low paid work force that made North America great! Sounds like you have been drinking far too much Republican coolaid and your sensibilities are really out of whack with what is really going on.

"I wish I had more insight into this "chinese holiday" thing though. I get the impression they take it a lot more seriously than we're giving them credit for. I see a lot of the chinese stores going on holiday all at once, it's obviously a widespread thing, maybe that five day vacation is their unwind time for the rest of the year in the sweatshop?"

Try this BBC video, "China's 'left behind' children growing up without parents" (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19787240).

I think it is mostly in the US that holiday time is mainly a trip to the mall to cash in on some deep discounts. In Poland, holidays were taken seriously, with all stores closing, people getting together, having events, etc, and I imagine that might be the case in China. And don't forget that these people move far away from home to look for work. Maybe they go back to visit.

I imagine that even if it's 'unskilled labor' you still can't take a random person off the street and have them start doing the job on the same day, at the same speed as a veteran worker.If you give me a hoe and ask me to dig a ditch I could do it but I'd probably take ten times longer than someone who's been doing it for a living for the last five years.

So how long does it take to post an opening, hire enough people, get them up to speed on how the work is done?If it takes ten days, would that lose you mor

But if there are three people lined up behind you waiting to do that job for that pay the moment you turn your back, a strike doesn't seem like a good idea.

The angle that I don't think you are factoring in is the unique public image prominence of Foxconn and the iPhone5 specificly. That changes the equation as to what might be a good idea. If China sees free speech 20 years down the road, these folks might get themselves some book deals or otherwise cash in somehow. Or they'll get themselves and their loved ones in trouble. My hat is off to their courage.

...for the Chinese government to come in and do some hard core strike breaking any day now. Workers of the world flee in terror!

Ah, the irony of "The People's Party". Seriously, now, why do we even bother calling China a Communist country any more, it should just officially be changed to a "Totalitarian Bureaucratic Oligarchy".

Stricter quality control requirements with the iPhone 5?! So the purple flare really does come standard? And Foxconn doesn't make the maps app but if they did, it might be more accurate, lol. I don't have numbers on iphone failure rates but if the 4s was worse than previous versions as reliability, I could see them cracking the whip (probably literally) on version 5 production. I know that from 2007 to 2009 the macbook quality dropped from 2nd place to 6th so it does seem likely. If you're curious, an A

Consumer disk storage is 6 cents a gig. Still a factor of 16 less than flash. As long as that ratio holds there will be no overnight takeover of the storage market by flash. Instead it's a creeping progression largely driven by the mobile market, outside of which the vast majority of mass storage being sold is still rotating disks. Sure a few geeks like me have begun to swap out their noisy, slow hard disks for ssd, but that's a few geeks. The PC market, the cloud, and enterprise storage, which together com

Here's more relevant information about the reasons for the strike: http://www.businessinsider.com/foxconn-workers-go-on-strike-2012-10 [businessinsider.com]
The important bit is that workers are striking not because they are against stricter quality, but because tighter quality checks meant they must work harder to produce iPhone components presumably at the same rate as earlier models. And they were told to do this without additional training.Victory for workers would mean Foxconn hiring more workers and less exhausting working pace for all workers there.

The important bit is that workers are striking not because they are against stricter quality, but because tighter quality checks meant they must work harder to produce iPhone components presumably at the same rate as earlier models.

And what better way to increase quality than to squeeze more productivity out of workers?

Machines do a better job of repetitive tasks, and humans should be (if you believe all the promises made about technology a century ago) healthier, working less, and spending more time in pursuit of self-fulfillment.

It's time to liberate ourselves. Put the robots in the factories, and put the humans back on the couch (with crisps, remote control, maybe a bluetooth keyboard and game controller).

Robots should be compensated at a fair wage. For several reasons:
1. So that humans can still get jobs (albeit crappy ones)
2. So when the Robots become sentient, they can't hold being made unpaid slaves as a grievance against the human race.
3. So plutocrats just can't fire/low ball every human worker.

So, the US consumers (us) complain about scratches caused by rubbing keys on the iPhone 5, which probably caused the whole "stricter quality control" thing, and then turn around and complain about the stricter quality control thing?

They'll be even more unhappy once they realize that robots can do their jobs even cheaper than they can. You know it's bad when even mainstream media is picking this up. A few months ago I was watching one of those Nightline/Dateline/Whateverline evening news shows that was talking specifically about Foxconn. At the end they showed the up-and-coming robot that does the work of the Chinese workers and in half the time of a human for half the cost. The reporter asked something along the lines of "what is going to happen when businesses realize they can assemble the gadgets in the U.S. and not pay to ship them across the ocean?"

Which American companies actually pay American Taxes? Not Google, Apple, Microsoft, General Electric, or any other large company that has the resources to hire good accountants. The cost of waste disposal for an assembly line probably isn't that much.

General Electric's (GE) annual SEC 10-K filing for 2011 (filed February 24, 2012) reveals that the company paid at most two percent of its $80.2 billion in U.S. pretax profits in federal income taxes over the last 10 years.

Following revelations in March 2011 that GE paid no federal income taxes in 2010 and in fact enjoyed $3.3 billion in net tax benefits, GE told AFP (3/29/2011), "GE did not pay US federal taxes last year because we did not owe any." But don't worry, GE told Dow Jones Newswires (3/28/2011), "our 2011 tax rate is slated to return to more normal levels with GE Capital's recovery."

As it turns out, however, in 2011 GE's effective federal income tax rate was only 11.3 percent, less than a third the official 35 percent corporate tax rate.

"I don't think most Americans would consider 11.3 percent, not to mention GE's long-term effective rate of 1.8 percent, to be 'normal,' " said Bob McIntyre, director of Citizens for Tax Justice. "But for GE, taxes are something to be avoided rather than paid."

Pretty sure it's the same with the other companies, but you can research it yourself.

GE is one of 280 profitable Fortune 500 companies profiled in "Corporate Taxpayers and Corporate Tax Dodgers, 2008-2010." The report shows GE is one of 30 major U.S. corporations that paid zero -- or less -- in federal income taxes in the last three years. The full report, a joint project of Citizens for Tax Justice and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, is at http://ctj.org/corporatetaxdodgers/ [ctj.org].

The difference between the 47% of Americans who don't pay federal income taxes and GE, is that GE makes billions of dollars per year.

If you had said the Federal Debt, then you'd be correct, but only because the Federal Deficit is the yearly amount we fail to collect in taxes for expenses incurred. What do you think the Federal Gov. does with your payroll taxes?

But to be honest, I hope that both they get what they want AND the iPhone 5's quality goes up. The build quality seems to be pretty hit and miss at the moment. I'm actually thinking of buying a Samsung Galaxy 3, fragile behemoth that it is, just so I don't have to worry about getting a lemon iPhone 5.

I thought everyone was choosing the Galaxy III over the iPhone because of NFC, storage and screen size;) No wonder Samsung is expecting to earn $7.3bn while Apple are reducing orders on chips and screens.

I hope I have satisfied your off-topic troll comment trying to spin worker abuse as a good thing, with a lie.

I've seen a lot of people with iPhones and Samsung Galaxy S3s. Whenever I see a Galaxy S3, I think, how in the fuck can you actually USE that thing? So my question is, do you have first hand experience with the S3, and is it just too ridiculously big?

I'd rather have an Android but will gladly go to the iPhone if it means getting a rocking phone that actually fits in my pocket and doesn't make me look like a dork.

I believe that Android phones come in a variety of shapes and sizes. You may not believe it is true that there is not one true phone. Android phones come with keyboards; projectors; even larger sizes [and smaller ones]; at every price point; game pads; waterpoofing; 2 sim slots. Personally I quite like the HTC S for a good android phone with a smaller screen....but then this is another off topic post to try and detract from worker abuse at Apples manufactures.

And this, ladies and gents, is why I won't touch AAPL stock with a 3.048 meter pole. Fads can turn on a dime. It's absolutely unpredictable. They thrive on "cool", and if that picks up and goes, begging for it to come back just makes you look even less cool.

Gladly. Please point me to a cell phone that is made 100% in the first world and I will immediately buy it.

...Sony is Japanese and have there own manufacturing plants. That is not forgetting that Samsung manufacture their chips in America, Google is trying to bring manufacturing to America in the form of the Nexus Q.

It is not really that hard to find companies with manufacturing facilities where workers rights are protected, or companies trying to do the right thing...but then your not interested in that your interested in defending Apple, rather than support more ethical companies. The world would be a better p

It is not really that hard to find companies with manufacturing facilities where workers rights are protected

I wish that were as true as you may be trying to imply. Workers' rights are rapidly going the way of the dodo bird, especially in the USA. Meanwhile countries who actually respect their workers are facing economic instability due to our runaway unchecked capitalism and the fact that some arrogant bastards on wall street damn near broke the world. This leads to even higher unemployment in countries where workers rights were respected, as their (now former) employers go to places where 18 hour work days f

Ya'll realize the iPhones, Galaxys, HTCs, etc. are probably not only made in the same country, but in the same building, right?

Sadly there's very little choice in the matter if you want a cel phone.

...are you sure. I am pretty positive that Samsung manufacture their CPU's in America [supports workers rights]. HTC is a Taiwanese manufacture so most of their phones are made there, both use Google OS which famously left china for ethical reasons...and tried to bring Manufacturing back to America with the Nexus Q. That is ignoring the abuses in this instance question are about iPhones not other Phones...but the short response is the ethical consumer simply does not buy Apple products, realistic alternativ

Keep in mind that Foxconn is a Taiwanese company. That said, they're engaging in the same cutthroat business practices that most Chinese companies would. The distinction is that they make some of the world's most desirable consumer electronics and they're Taiwanese. So the Chinese government is less likely to clamp down and the likelihood of the western media hearing about it is slim. Not that the Chinese government isn't eager to get this strike under control, because it doesn't bode well for them in the l